CCNA Boot Camp

For a variety of reasons,I’ve set down the road of getting Cisco Certified. My first exam is to be CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Associate). At present, I’m probably going to follow this on with CCNA-Voice, a new certification that adds basic VOIP to the CCNA cert. With all the OCS training I’m doing, some VOIP and Networking fundamentals, plus a better look at how Cisco tackle VOIP seems a good idea!

In the Cisco world, CCNA has been the traditional certification start5ing point. Today, you can achieve the CCNA certification either by taking two separate exams, ICND1 and ICND2 (ICND = Interconnecting Cisco Network Devices), or by taking a single combined CCNA exam. The two exam approach makes studying a bit easier, but you do have to take two exams. A key benefit of taking the two exam route, is that by passing ICND1, you also are awarded the CCENT (a new cert coming in at a more introductory level than CCNA).

The basics of the CCNA cert itself can be found at http://tinyurl.com/aw5k3.  To support the individual exam route, Cisco has two courses CCNA ICND Part 1, and CCNA ICND Part 2 which you can take at a Cisco training partner. The ICND1 and ICND1 courses are each 5 days long and are instructor led supported by live remote labs using real Cisco kit. The Cisco boot-camp option  enables you to do just one week in the classroom and supports the single exam approach. But this does mean you should having some background before attending the boot-camp. And you need to be willing to do post class work before going for the combined exam.

I took Global Knowledge’s 5-day CCNA boot camp last week. It was a long hard week (starting at 0900, finishing up around 18:00, albeit with regular breaks. Our tutor knew his stuff, and was able to give us both a big picture view (think lots of whiteboard stuff along with interesting stories) plus focus on the detail contained on the slides. Each lecture was re-inforces by on-line labs. The labs were actually using live Cisco kit that was in the US, so we used telnet to do all the configuration and a terminal services type connection to a ‘pc’ to do some testing. All in all, the labs worked very well. And if you got things totally messed up (which I did during one lab) you can just resent the lab environment back to the start of the lab and try again (in my case, 2nd

Cisco also has a huge amount of on-line resources to help candidates study for all the Cisco exams, from the Cisco Learning Network (https://cisco.hosted.jivesoftware.com/index.jspa?ciscoHome=true). This site holds a variety of exam focused material including discussion groups, blog posts and ‘documents’ (some of which are actually web casts).

Given the projected growth in networking and the need for increasing numbers of certified engineers, the Cisco route is looking good.

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